People Often Get This Wrong About Marriage, Here's Why | Eckhart Tolle

You always marry the wrong person unless you awaken to a deeper dimension in yourself that transcends the conditioned personality. It's not the greatest story. It's a problematic story. It's not easy being me. In fact, I don't think anybody is having a more difficult time than me. And I need to think about that a bit more. How can I How can I solve this dilemma of me, this conundrum, this 'I am'? It's amazing that many people consider themselves, without verbalizing it in that way, they consider themselves to be a problem to be solved. There's something, and this is very interesting, There's something in the human psyche, if you are not awakening at all yet, so in the normal state of consciousness or unconsciousness, there's something there, there's always either in the background or in the foreground, if it's in the background, there's a sense of unease, a sense of something is missing, something is lacking. And what it is that's missing, perhaps the mind will figure out, okay, what I need to be fulfilled is this, that, that, that. Or the mind might not even know, because whenever you achieve something that you think will liberate you from this permanent sense of insufficiency, then whenever you think you found it, it doesn't take long and then you say, "Oh no," because something— there's something else goes wrong there too. There's a new relationship, there's a new work situation, there's a new living situation. So there's often you deceive yourself, you say, "No, I found the answer to the dilemma of me," I'm liberated now because I have found the partner that I've been looking for, the one, I have found the one, and this delusion lasts for a little while, we don't know how long it could last, for a year, probably less, you can see when You see, when you look to anything for— let's use this almost spiritual term— salvation, because you're really looking to something out there for salvation. Salvation through a deeply satisfying relationship, permanently satisfying. Salvation through some kind of acquisition of something adding to your life. Salvation through moving to a totally different country or place, salvation through recognition from other people. Once people recognize me, when I become famous, then I'll be fully myself, then I will have found salvation. But all these people, when they find those things, it doesn't take long. Let's take relationships. You go out, you go dating. I don't know if they still do it these days, dating. Maybe dating is old-fashioned because everything happens on the phone. Tinder swiping. And then you have a date. When you go to a restaurant, you can see, you can immediately see with a couple sitting whether a couple has been together already for quite a while or whether they're only meeting for the first, second, or third time, we're dating. The others are not dating, they're already living together, totally different energy field. Because the ones who are dating, they still are under the delusion that they found salvation through the other person. And you can, you can, when you observe people, you can see it the way they look at each other. They're both in a state of hypnosis because they go, "So wonderful," and you don't even know that you're playing a role unconsciously and the other person is playing their role and these two roles interact and you think, well, This is the reality. And then you see another couple, they obviously have been together for a while and they kind of, they sit there and most likely these days they are on their phones. So they're already living together. And so when the dating goes to the next stage, you start moving in together, then These days it often happens before the wedding, if there even is a wedding, but so you move in together and you quickly notice that this person is not the same person that you dated. Soon after a few days or weeks, sometimes months, but that's maximum, you find, who is this person? There are suddenly aspects of the personality that you find deeply irritating, if not disturbing, and then you question yourself, say, "I must have made a mistake." But it could also be that your partner feels the same thing about you. What happened? So you're experiencing a conditioned personality. You're no longer experiencing a part that somebody is playing. You experience the conditioning of this, the person. And every person is, if you live with them for a little while, everybody will display behavior that is not that pleasant. They also have a pain body. If you've read my books and talks, you know what the pain body is, and we may talk about it later. It's an accumulation of past emotional pain that lives in you, but it's dormant, and then after a while it becomes active because it needs to feed on some kind of drama. And when you start living with somebody and for the first time you experience this person's pain body, when suddenly there's a shift in the entire energy field of that person, it's no longer the same person at all. It's a dreadful thing and you don't know what it is. You say, "Oh, well." And that's how Somebody wrote an article a while ago in the paper that says, "Why you married the wrong person." So in that sense, it's not pessimistic, but it sounds pessimistic. You always marry the wrong person. Unless, unless you awaken to a deeper dimension in yourself that transcends the conditioned personality, then you have something more, something genuine, something that is not part of the conditioned entity that we call the person or the personality. Without that, the state of insufficiency, of lack, of not enough, of something missing, but you don't know what, or you think you know what, but that's not it, you can never get rid of it. So if you remain trapped in the mental conditional, the conditioned energy field of the personality, then you are condemned to perpetual dissatisfaction, to put it mildly, or to use an even more generic term, unhappiness.